Regarding its status within the modern world, psychology as the discipline of interiority is an asylum
Notice that metaphysics is preserved in psychology in its logic, in the way it thinks, but not necessarily in its contents, and definitely not in its absolute refusal of any ontological claims. Psychology thinks as metaphysics does, but only as a procedure, a methodology, a way of looking at things, without claiming ontological validity, without saying that things are as it sees.
Here it is of the utmost importance to remark that “ontological” in Giegerich is always associated with positivity, entity, substance (cf. WIS, p. 26-29). Consequently, absolute negativity could not be an ontological category. However, this restricted sense of “ontological” does not exhaust all what is implied in an ontological assertion. If we examine Plato’s ontological conception, for instance, which is organized around the idea of being, we see that being is not the ultimate fundament of the real, but is itself the result of two polar principles – the One and the Dyad – which consequently are not being, but beyond being (as substance, or essence), epekeina tes ousias. Thus these principles are absolute negative, and nonetheless they necessarily and implicitly belong to any ontological assertion as the fundament of being and of its intelligibility. Therefore, ontology is not necessarily alien to logical absolute negativity: it presupposes it as its ultimate intelligible foundation, the real foundation of the intelligibility of the real (its “soul”, in our parlance). The distinction between the two levels (logic and ontology) cannot be a dissociation, otherwise any ontic phenomenon would be intrinsically unintelligible and unthinkable; consequently, no ontological assertion would be possible; scientific knowledge also would not be possible, as it presupposes the intelligibility of positive-factual reality (and, by the way, science cannot on principle explain this intelligibility, which thus is the prerogative of ontology); and finally, the dissociation would render the logical dimension of the real either an unreal flatus vocis, or a free floating positivity...
Wolfgang Giegerich has said that “positivism is, as it were, a metaphysical thought-style deprived of the metaphysical world dimension belonging to it” (WIS, p. 23). Mutatis mutandis, the same can be applied to psychology as the discipline of interiority: it is a metaphysical thought-style (“a mode or style of perceiving, reflecting, interpreting, and reacting”, metaphysics “reduced to the form and status of a mere methodological approach”) consciously self-deprived of the metaphysical world dimension belonging to it (through giving up “any claim to being or striving for true knowing”). As such, psychology as the discipline of interiority is, as it were, the paradoxical nihilistic form assumed by the metaphysics of absolute negativity under the post-metaphysical logical conditions of modernity. This strongly resembles a neurotic compromise formation, with the sole fundamental difference that in psychology we are implicitly conscious of that status. This consciousness reveals itself when we accept the hobby status of psychology as the discipline of interiority. In this case, and in the light of its structurally neurotic epistemic stance, psychology is nothing but the conscious simulation of metaphysics in post-metaphysical times, a harmless pastime with no epistemic relevance, “merely one of the things one can do if one is so inclined”. The conjugation of the nihilistic framework of psychology with its self-definition as a pastime forcefully evokes Nietzsche’s characterization of the Last Man in the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (cf. NIETZSCHE, 1927, p. 12): the choice of a nihilistic pastime as one’s job is a feature of the condition of Last Men. Thus we can say that as psychologists we are logically at the same level of Nietzsche’s Last Man.
...psychology as the discipline of interiority “tries to fight or cure those very same mechanisms in the patient in order to defend itself against becoming aware of its own neurosis”
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